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Something I've been fiddling with on a project and I thought I would share. Hope its useful for someone!

There are quite a few VTOL models out there now, but all of them seem to rely on jet engines for thrust (stormraven and valkyrie, I'm looking at you!)

I know for the Valkyrie several people have pulled the wings off Avatar toys to get the big fans, but I needed something a bit smaller and no-one in the wider community seems to make these things.

So anyway, the secret is Warmachine bases, apparently

Here are some WIP pics, but its simple enough.



Get 2 WM bases, or similar with the big lip. Trim out the centre and glue them back to back. I've added in a small aerofoil out of plasticard for interest, but you could leave them plain.

Here they are on the side of my WIP Banshee:



And with additional structural support:



I've used the largest size, but you can easily use the smaller sizes for smaller fans.

That's a pretty cool idea. Simple, and looks pretty good so far. What are you planning on using for the actual fan? Tons of pieces of plasticard?

Fans of this type only tend to have 3 to 5 blades on them, rather than the jet intake compressor type fan that often gets used in models to cover the hole entirely. I was thinking of leaving them open though as the blades would be hard to see when active. The other alternative is to put some kind of translucent disk in there to make it look like something is spinning really fast, but I haven't investigated that option fully yet.

Maybe find some PC fans of the right size (60mm is a popular fan size) and extract the blades from that?

Could even make them spin with a 9v battery. Not sure how long that'd last though.

http://zinge.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&path=18&product_id=130

Might be a tad small (they're more suited to being recessed in the wing rather than attached on the end)

Oooh. Too small, maybe, but at least they exist!

Have you considered a 1/24 scale Harrier? I know it's fixed winged, but the take off and thrust engines would be large enough to replace fans (I'm sorry, I googled for about 15 minutes and this was the best idea I got from it.)

I think Airfix makes a 1/24 harrier, it'd cost about the same as a storm raven (110$ AU)

Actually you might be wrong for the record. How big are those rubber tubes? 1" maybe 2" 30mm is about an 1", a little bit more.

Yerg, I'd rather not have to add another stormraven-value to this thing

There are no rubber tubes, the VTOL fans for my Banshee use Warmachine type bases. So the smaller rings in the first picture are the standard 30(?)mm bases while that ones I'm using are the largest I could find (50 or 60mm I think).